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Monday, March 12, 2012

I've been saddened lately to see that Shefki has given up maintaining TBag. I am guessing, like a lot of people, he is on hiatus until MoP comes out (this Summer?). This has left me to maintaining my bags and bank by hand (/GASP!). It's dreadful, things everywere, herbals mixed with PVP gear, and gems stuck under that piece of gingerbread cookie I am still hanging on to.

Happily, I have found ArkInventory. This is also an all-in-one bag solution, but with some interesting quirks. First off, it combines nicely all of my bags into a single source. I can sort each of them based on various criteria so that items are quick and easy to find. Once it is configured it is a very nice looking interface with even more thematic options available. Finish it off, it contains a few nice features that TBag still doesn't have.

Starting view

First time you fire up ArkInventory, you will be presented with the default profile view. It's currently sorted into a single bag, and the sorting is limited to the bag that contains the item. Not very interesting.

Edit Mode

The first step you are going to want to take is to go into Edit Mode (Gear top corner). Edit mode allows you define rows and columns for your various items, up to 5 columns and as many rows as you want.

Assigning Categories

Start off by clicking on one of the box numbers. I clicked on 6. Now you pick what items you want to put into this box. For 6 I want all my soulbound gear, so I select System - Equipment (Soulbound). Wa-la, all my gear is in this box. For sorting, (since the menu is still up), I click Sorting - Default Bag - Rarity ... Now that entire square is sorted!

Final bag config

Rinse, repeat with any level of granularity you want. I found I wanted my healing and mana pots in the same square, but not mixed with my food and drink. I also wanted to minimize the screen space my bags took up, so I hid all the empty spaces (assign all empty to an unused square, then select 'categories assigned - empty - empty and select hide', I suppose you could hide them in the same square using the same method, but??).

Only bah-humbug, is scaling. I've got most my buttons running at 60% normal size. When opening up my bags and the icons are 100%, they seem huge! The scaling options are 'hidden' under the backpack by your name. Click that, then config, then settings. I also played with the padding and width so the bag view is more tall than square (wide screen monitor = less real estate used). Now that I've scaled down, the currency options at the bottom don't display very nicely.

Overall I love this all-in-one bag replacement. Best off, I haven't even started exploring some of the more advanced features like 'rules'.

You might want to look at the addon, BagSaver (see linked post under "saddened"). It will auto-sell all gray items for you when you visit vendors/repair. In addition, if you get full, bagsaver will suggest on discarding your least value item.